Report: Apple "in Serious Talks" with Major League Baseball to Broadcast Games
Let’s get it back to baseball.
As you know, the players are currently locked out and the Phillies haven’t been to the playoffs since Obama’s first term. It’s been a barren baseball wasteland in the Delaware Valley for a decade now.
We’re waiting for labor talk news, but Andrew Marchand at The New York Post dropped an interesting nugget on Tuesday, explaining that MLB has been talking to Apple about broadcasting games:
If a deal is finalized, it would represent a significant milestone in sports broadcasting since Apple has long been looked upon as a potential stop for major sports TV rights. One of Apple’s rival companies, Amazon, has already carved out an important piece of real estate in this space, as it will become the exclusive home of NFL “Thursday Night Football” in the fall.
A potential MLB-Apple deal would not be anywhere close to the magnitude of the NFL and Amazon — which is for more than a billion dollars per year — but MLB and Apple would be the entree for the technology behemoth into the coverage of top live sports.
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The package MLB has been attempting to sell is weekday national games that ESPN recently relinquished. ESPN will no longer have regular Monday and Wednesday games. The ESPN games were not exclusive in local markets. It is unclear at this point if Apple would be allowed to wall off these select games from regional sports network coverage or not.
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For what it’s worth, there’s a vehement pro-Apple faction at Crossing Broad, led by Kyle Scott, aka “The Maestro.” This faction thinks Apple can do no wrong, and they buy everything Apple makes. Apple could go out and release a new iPhone, where the processing speed is increased from 1.6GHZ to 1.7GHZ and these guys will go “oh my God Apple did it again.” And then they drop $700 on the new phone. If Apple made toilet paper they’d buy the Apple toilet paper.
But that’s beside the point. It’s interesting to think about MLB games going to a streaming service. The Phillies have had some games on Facebook over the years, and that was kind of a rough transition, trying to help your 68-year-old uncle find the damn game. Regardless, it’s a different broadcasting scene in pro sports these days, so it seems inevitable that MLB would branch out and follow a path similar to that of the other four majors.